On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 06:19:26PM +0000, Edenyard wrote:
Does any one have any ideas how to track down what's waking my hard disk up every few seconds? The problem is that the Linux PC sometimes spends hours not being used and I'd like the HDD to spin down after (say) 15 minutes of inactivity. I've set the BIOS power-saving HDD spin-down and this works well enough when booted to DOS, but in Linux it just won't sleep. If I force it to sleep using 'hdparm -y /dev/hda1', it spins down and promptly starts up again after a few seconds.
Are you using ext3 or reiserfs or XFS? some of the journalling filesystems write a checkpoint (not sure of the exact terminology) to disk every few seconds. If you are using ext3 you can play around with the journalling type options when the disk is mounted, or you could try mounting it with ext2 and seeing if it stops the mysterious accesses...
Just a thought anyhow.
Adam